ast night my wife and I watched a charming little movie
called “Wide Awake.” It was about a ten-year old Catholic boy who was on a
mission to find, and talk to, God. He was very concerned about the state of his
beloved grandfather who had recently passed away. He just wanted to talk to God
about him and get some reassurance.

Being a logical-minded little boy, he thought
about who would most likely be in contact with God. To his way of thinking, the
more religious someone appeared to be, the more likely they were to be in touch
with the Deity. He tried the school nuns, a visiting cardinal, and even the pope
himself. No satisfaction.

He tried other religions too. Nothing seemed to
work. He kept looking for some sign that God was responding to him. Despite his
best efforts, he detected no divine feedback. He was on the brink of giving up
on God and becoming an atheist like his best friend, when that friend, home
alone, had an epileptic attack. Our seeker, being driven home by his mother, who
was a nurse, felt led to stop by his friend’s house. He asked his mother to stop
and she complied. The boy entered the house and found his friend lying in
epileptic shock on the floor. He ran out and called in his mother who ran in and
helped the downed friend. The friend, a self-professed atheist, came to believe
that it must’ve been God who had sent his best friend to rescue him just in the
nick of time. The idea that God might be around after all began to assert itself
in both boys.

Then one day something happened that changed
everything. A small blond boy who seemed not to be part of the student body, but
who was dressed in the school uniform, walked up to our boy-on-a-mission and
said, “Your grandfather is alright” or words to that effect. It was exactly what
our hero wanted to hear. When he turned around, the boy who had brought him this
good news had disappeared. The implication was: the boy was an angel sent to
reassure our seeker.

What’s the point of this beautiful little
story? For me, it is that we are more likely to find God in our experience than
in religion.

The Christian Agnostic

Back in the 70’s I read what at the time turned out to be a
disturbing book: The Christian Agnostic by Leslie D. Weatherhead, a
British church pastor. It was disturbing then, comforting today. The reason it
was disturbing when I first read it is because it shook the foundations of my
belief system. It was one of those frighteningly honest books that stirs one to
think twice about things normally taken for granted. After reading that book, I
became convinced that I couldn’t prove the existence of God to anyone, including
myself. It’s simply not do-able. I can reason about the existence of God in the
most compelling possible ways, but I can’t produce God through reason. I can’t
capture him in a lab and study him. God is simply beyond the grasp of science or
reason. More disturbingly, He’s also often beyond the reach of religion.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that there is far
more evidence that God exists than that he doesn’t. I also believe that in our
time God is revealing more of himself as our knowledge of His Creation expands.
We are seeing, for the first time, just how intelligent God must be; how vast is
His power; and how wonderful it is to live on this tiny blue incubator planet
tucked away on the edges of the Milky Way.

Convinced by Specious Arguments

I realize that my personal belief system in the 70’s was
embarrassingly simplistic and founded more upon the authority of a domineering
church leader than on what I actually knew, and could prove, to be true. I had
been convinced by a set of specious arguments that God must exist, that the
Bible must be His Word, and that there were no errors whatsoever in its original
texts. I also believed that I knew the essential truth about doctrine, and that
what I knew distinguished the true Church from the myriad counterfeits that were
“out there.” I felt secure hunkered down in the midst of the tightly circled
wagons of dogmatism.

Weatherhead’s writings, along with those of
others, blew much of that certainty out of the water. I began to see that many
of my beliefs were hanging by skyhooks. I realized that I was standing on
shifting epistemological sand. Like the little boy in the movie, I didn’t want
arguments about God, I wanted God himself – and I couldn’t find him in
the hierarchy of the Church of which I was then a minister. I couldn’t find him
in the buildings, in the church college campus, in the church’s literature or in
its meager liturgy. I didn’t find him in the feasts (Leviticus 23) my family and
I attended for so many years.

Instead, I found religion – a poor substitute
for God. I found words -- torrents, avalanches, and tsunamis of words. The words
were often shouted with great thunderous authority. But when the noise was over,
they fell lifelessly to the ground. People went to their cars and drove home,
often feeling worse than when they’d arrived at services. It isn’t mere words
that we need. It isn’t religious authoritarianism that we need. Nor is it
mindless rote liturgy. All the driving to and from services, the standing up,
sitting down, singing, and canned public prayers often yield precious little
spiritual substance. Like the boy in the movie, what we really want and need is
God Himself. Ultimately, the questing boy found God in his, and his friend’s,
experiences.

Three Ways of Knowing

Leslie Weatherhead, in his book, cited an observation by
the 12th century English philosopher, Roger Bacon: “Of the three ways
of acquiring knowledge – authority, reasoning and experience, only the last is
effective” (ibid. p. 79).

Authority can tell us what is true in its
estimation. It can even insist that we accept and believe it. It can seek to
coerce us into doing so; but if that “truth” is not verified in our experience,
it will soon dissipate.

We can reason about God until we get a mental
hernia, and all reasoning eventually rings hollow if we cannot take the leap
into an experience of faith. Writes Weatherhead: “He [the reader] must pursue
the way of argument as far as it can take him, and then make a leap of faith in
the direction of the trend of the evidence, acting as though it were
sound. Reason will take us so far on firm ground. But then there must be a leap
in the same direction…Faith is not a leap in the dark, or, as the
schoolboy said, ‘believing what you know to be untrue,’ or treading a road that
is contrary to reason and superstitiously running in another direction. It is
taking the road of evidence as far as it will go and then, with the energy
provided by meditating on the character of God as Christ revealed him, making a
leap of faith, only to land in a conviction as strong as proof can supply” (The
Christian Agnostic, p. 79, author’s emphasis).

When I first read those words, they were
disturbing. Today they are comforting in their honesty. They ring true in my
experience. For many years, I have been feeding on a thought originally offered
by Stephen J. Gould: “Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God’s
possible superintendence of nature” (Scientific American, July, 1992).
Gould was right. Science cannot put us in touch with God, but I believe it
points the way to him (Psalm 19:1-6; Romans 1:20). For me, the more I know about
the universe and my immediate reality, the more I know about God. I’m convinced
that God is giving us a broader and deeper revelation of himself through the
discoveries of science. The challenge is to reconcile that revelation with the
written one upon which we have so long exclusively relied.

Automobiles and the Universe

While thinking about this article the other day, it
occurred to me that an automobile could be analogous to the universe. Years ago,
when I was a small boy, my father bought his first car, a 1947 Austin. Dad was
an engineer with an insatiable curiosity about how things worked. He laid out a
large tarp in the driveway, and proceeded to take his new car completely apart
and lay out all of its parts on the tarp. He checked everything out and put it
all back together again. He now knew exactly how his new auto worked, where all
of its parts belonged, and what they did. By such close scrutiny, my father came
to understand that his vehicle was a manufactured product, designed to work a
certain way. Yet, in examining this product, he did not find its maker. Its
maker was outside the product – off in England somewhere. It was evident from a
close view of the product itself that it was a designed, manufactured
automobile. It could not have designed or assembled itself. It worked because it
was designed to work.

Leslie Weatherhead says in his book: “For
myself, the old argument which seeks to prove God’s existence from design, if
differently stated, is still convincing…it demands more of credulity to imagine
that the universe was all a huge accident than to believe in the operation of a
mind” (ibid. p. 79). My sentiments exactly; when I examine the universe –
especially these days – I find it ever easier to take that leap of faith to the
idea that it’s all a masterpiece of intelligence and creation. My father could
not imagine his Austin just happening into existence in his driveway. He knew
who had designed and manufactured it, and how it worked. If something went
wrong, he knew how to fix it.

My leap of faith is not random, haphazard or
arbitrary – I believe it is a leap in the direction of the evidence. The things
that we are learning about this vast and ancient Creation continue to convince
me that it is not just something that happened on its own, but that it was
deliberately brought into being and configured in an engineered way.

The philosopher, Immanuel Kant, once said, “Two
things fill the mind with ever increasing wonder and awe – the starry heavens
about me and the moral law within me.”

The Science of God

In his book The Science of God, physicist Gerald
Schroeder, an Orthodox Jew, writes: “If the energy of the big bang were
different by one part out of

there would be no life anywhere in our universe. The
universe is tuned for life from its inception. Genesis agrees: when life first
appears on the third day, the word creation does not appear. We are merely told
‘The earth brought forth’ life. Earth had within it the necessary properties for
life to flourish (p. 5).”

If I counted accurately, there should be 120
zeroes following the number 10 above. That’s 10 to the 120th power.
Schroeder then quotes Michael Turner, an astrophysicist from the University of
Chicago who says: “the precision is as if one could throw a dart across the
entire universe and hit a bullseye one millimeter in diameter on the other
side.”

I am no longer capable of examining what we
have been learning about cosmology, and about the human entity, and not
taking the leap of faith to the idea of God. For me, God must exist. That
is the direction in which all of the evidence overwhelmingly points. As the
Psalmist wrote, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the
works of his hands (Psalm 19:1).”

Gerald Schroeder also cites the conclusions of
Roger Penrose, a professor of mathematics at Oxford: “Penrose finds the laws of
nature tuned for life. This balance of nature’s laws is so perfect and so
unlikely to have occurred by chance that he avers an intelligent ‘Creator’ must
have chosen them” (Schroeder, p. 21).

Schroeder then quotes a physicist: “It is as if
we were written into the equations of the universe at its inception or in the
words of physicist Paul Davies, ‘built into the scheme of things in a very basic
way’” (ibid. p. 21).

I’m not a scientist, and I’m not a theologian
or a scholar; just a Christian trying to find the reality of God in a universe
of calculated wonder. I haven’t found much of God in my explorations of
religion. Like the little boy in the movie, I attended Catholic boy’s schools
for two years and I didn’t find him there. In fact, if you look at the world of
organized religion today, you may run into all kinds of things that are contrary
to God: party spirit; ruthless politics; hatred; pedophilia; torture; murder;
greed; moral compromise; competition, religious empire-building and a myriad of
abuses of money, power and authority. The world seems to be influencing the
Church far more than the Church is influencing the world these days. Instead of
being a moral force, much of it is a moral farce. Apart from perhaps a brief
period during the original apostolic era, when it has it ever been any other
way? Even then, there was conflict and controversy.

It seems to me that a lot of basic assumptions
about Christianity need rethinking in our time. What does it really mean to be a
Christian in the modern world? Is the Church morally and intellectually
bankrupt? Does it have anything to say to modern man? Has it lost its Gospel?
Has the Church devolved into a mere collection of politicized organizations that
view their own numerical and financial growth as the criterion for spiritual
success?

More importantly, where is the connection
between the Church and God? Where are the people who talk to God and who hear
from him? Where in the Body is Christ giving specific and concrete direction?
Like the little boy in the movie, are we looking for God in all the wrong
places? Have we failed to hear and heed the still small voice in our own
experience?

Was the apostle Paul not right when he said of
God to the Athenian philosophers: “…he is not far from each one of us. For in
him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27-28).

If God is that close, why are we shouting into
the universe, “Where are you God?” Why do we look into the stars for their
creator when he lives within us? “We know that we live in him and he in us,
because he has given us of his Spirit” (I John 4:13).

Jesus said, “Seek and you shall find.”
As the little boy in the movie found out, it’s a matter of knowing where to
look.